The Lesser Nobility and the French Reformation
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Preprint The Lesser Nobility and the French Reformation BENEDICT, Philip Joseph Reference BENEDICT, Philip Joseph. The Lesser Nobility and the French Reformation. Available at: http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:96924 Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version. 1 / 1 The Lesser Nobility and the French Reformation Philip Benedict PREPRINT—to be published in Kurt Andermann and Wolfgang Breul eds., Ritterschaft und Reformation Few subjects within the history of the French Reformation have received more attention over the centuries than that of the nobility's role within the movement, but the spotlight has usually been on the high aristocracy. No account of early French Protestantism can overlook Marguerite de Navarre, her daughter Jeanne d'Albret, Jeanne's husband Antoine de Bourbon, or Antoine's younger brother the prince of Condé. If the historical memory of France's Protestant minority has enshrined any person as its hero in the way that Luther became the hero of the German Reformation, that person would be the Admiral Coligny, whose monument, not Calvin's, stands outside the Temple de l'Oratoire in Paris. A deeply influential interpretation, most famously articulated by Lucien Romier in the early twentieth century and recently reiterated by Hugues Daussy in Le parti huguenot, argues that the movement only became politicized and seriously challenged public order when significant figures within the high nobility embraced the cause.1 But to shed comparative light on Franz von Sickingen and the German Reformation, the spotlight must be turned toward the lesser nobility, whose situation resembled more closely the Ritterschaft of the German Rhineland, but concerning which the secondary literature is considerably spottier. A few Protestant theologians or literary figures of lesser noble stock, notably Theodore Beza and Agrippa d'Aubigné, have been 1 Lucien Romier, Le Royaume de Catherine de Médicis: la France à la veille des guerres de religion, Vol. 2, Paris 1925, p. 260-265; Hugues Daussy, Le parti huguenot. Chronique d'une désillusion (1557-1572), Geneva 2014, esp. p. 10 and passim. Also in this vein: Richard Nürnberger, Die Politisierung des Französischen Protestantismus: Calvin und die Anfänge des protestantischen Radikalismus, Tübingen 1948. 2 the object of a steady stream of scholarly studies.2 For a brief moment after 1980, the vogue for social history created a small boom in local studies of the nobility, some of which examined topics pertinent to the Reformation, chiefly how many noblemen opted for Protestantism and why.3 The same questions also shaped two excellent synthetic essays prepared for prior conference volumes by leading French specialists.4 This contribution proposes to identify and explore a wider range of issues concerning the role of the lesser French nobility in the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. It will then recount in some detail the involvement of a single individual, Charles Dupuy, seigneur de Montbrun, whose adventurous life illustrates particularly well the ways in which at least one segment of the lesser nobility championed the Protestant cause. First, some background is in order. Students of the German nobility may find the picture of brawls, blood feuds and naked bullying that the studies of Stuart Carroll and Michel Nassiet have shown to typify aristocratic comportment in many provinces to be familiar.5 Nonetheless, sixteenth-century France differed from the territories across the Vosges in being a large, relatively centralized monarchy with a substantial administrative apparatus and an army actively at war for much of the century. French aristocrats thus 2 Paul-F. Geisendorf, Théodore de Bèze, Geneva 1949; Scott M. Manetsch, Theodore Beza and the Quest for Peace in France, 1572-1598, Leiden 2000; Alain Dufour, Théodore de Bèze. Poète et théologien, Geneva 2006; Armand Garnier, Agrippa d'Aubigné et le Parti Protestant. Contribution à l'histoire de la Réforme en France, Paris 1928; André Thierry, Agrippa d'Aubigné, auteur de l''Histoire universelle', Lille, Atelier de Reproduction des Thèses, 1982; Madeleine Lazard, Agrippa d'Aubigné, Paris, 1998. 3 Key studies in this genre are James B. Wood, The Nobility of the Election of Bayeux, 1463-1666: Continuity through Change, Princeton 1980; Janine Garrisson-Estèbe, Protestants du Midi 1559-1598, Toulouse 1980, p. 22-28; Jean-Marie Constant, Nobles et paysans en Beauce aux XVIème et XVIIème siècles, Lille, Atelier de Reproduction des Thèses, 1981; Kristen Neuschel, Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth- Century France, Ithaca 1989; Michel Cassan, Le temps des guerres de religion. Le cas du Limousin (vers 1530-vers 1630), Paris 1996, p. 92-102. 4 Jean-Marie Constant, The Protestant Nobility in France during the Wars of Religion: A Leaven of Innovation in a Traditional World, in: Philip Benedict, Guido Marnef, Henk van Nierop, Marc Venard (Eds.), Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands 1555-1585, Amsterdam 1999, p. 69-82; Hugues Daussy, Les élites face à la Réforme dans le royaume de France (ca. 1520-ca. 1570), in: Philip Benedict, Silvana Seidel Menchi, Alain Tallon (Eds.), La Réforme en France et en Italie. Contacts, comparaisons, contrastes, Rome 2007, p. 331-349. 5 Stuart Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France, Oxford 2006; Michel Nassiet, La Violence, une histoire sociale. France XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, Seyssel 2011. 3 differed from their German counterparts in that preferment derived more from attendance at court and was exercised more through formal institutions, offices and commands. The best analyses of the class distinguish three strata of unequal power and wealth: at the top, the great aristocrats who filled the key roles at court and in the army and built up extensive clientage networks through the influence that flowed from their ready access to the king; below them, the "noblesse seconde" of men exercising key command posts at the provincial level; and finally the great mass of those possessing noble status and privileges, constituting one to two per cent of the total population. This third group, our focus here, can in turn be divided into three categories based on its members' principal activities and lifestyle: the military nobles who participated regularly in France's numerous wars; the country gentlemen who directed most of their energies to the administration of the rural estates on which they lived; and an urban nobility that it is not yet appropriate to call the noblesse de robe, particularly numerous in the southern half of the kingdom, composed of town-dwelling gentlemen and those royal office-holders, lawyers and former merchants who had acquired a seigneurie and the status that went with it. The lesser nobility was thus itself diverse in lifestyle, education, and place of residence, perhaps more so that its Central European counterparts.6 One stock image about the nobility and the Reformation in France is that it was only when leading members of the Bourbon and Châtillon families converted in the late 1550s that the aristocracy began to shape the movement in significant ways; before then, Protestant heresy was a phenomenon of clergymen, artisans and non-noble members of the urban elites. This may well be an illusion bred by over-reliance on the martyrological tradition. Already before 1550, non-schismatic evangelical currents circulated in the 6 The literature on the French nobility as a whole is too vast to be cited. For some studies that reveal particularly well the range of situations that characterized the estate in the sixteenth century, see Robert R. Harding, Anatomy of a Power Elite: The Provincial Governors of Early Modern France, New Haven 1978; Laurent Bourquin, Noblesse seconde et pouvoir en Champagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Paris 1994; Ariane Boltanski, Les ducs de Nevers et l'État royal. Genèse d'un compromis (ca 1550-ca 1600), Geneva 2006; Malcolm Walsby, The Counts of Laval: Culture, Patronage and Religion in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century France, Aldershot 2007; Jonathan Dewald, The Formation of a Provincial Nobility: The Magistrates of the Parlement of Rouen 1499- 1610, Princeton 1980; Madeleine Foisil, Le Sire de Gouberville, un gentilhomme normand au XVIe siècle, Paris 1981. 4 milieu of Marguerite of Navarre and were embraced by two prominent figures of the noblesse seconde, Anne de Parthenay and her husband Antoine de Pons, governor of Saintonge, both of whom were members of the entourage of Renée de France that was driven from Ferrara in the mid-1540s for heterodoxy.7 Among Marguerite's household officers was Jacques Groslot, seigneur de Champ-Baudouin, descended from a rich Orléans merchant family, whose good wishes were passed along to Zwingli in a letter of 1524 and who later would lose his post as bailli of Orléans because of his heretical views.8 If few noblemen turn up in Crespin's martyrology, this is because aristocrats usually received preferential treatment from the French courts in heresy cases. Despite this, heresy trials do turn up suspects from the second estate as early as 1530, when a group of noble men and women in Picardy were denounced to the Parlement of Paris for supporting schoolmasters and preachers who attacked purgatory, the cult of the saints, auricular confession, and the mandatory fasts of the church. One of them, the seigneur de Cardonnet, was accused of publicly advocating clerical marriage and of telling female religious who requested alms to get married instead.9 In 1542, two Norman noblemen were even put to death by the Parlements of Paris and Bordeaux for "blasphemous and heretical speech" and "seditious blasphemy".10 If noblemen were under-represented among the early martyrs for the cause, they decidedly were not among refugees to Geneva. In 1549 that city's authorities opened a special register to keep track of the refugees flooding in. Of the first five hundred subjects of the French king who swore the required oath to "live according to God and the holy evangelical reformation", some 23, or 4.6 per cent, bore the honorifics "noble" or "écuyer".11 7 E.